Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Ming Dynasty

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 04:36, 22 January 2008.

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Ming Dynasty

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What's up fellow low-lives; are you ready for this chapter of Chinese history wikipedians? Are you prepared to wade through 102 KB of text to nit-pick every little mistake in this article you can find? You know you want to; yaarrr matey, it's in your blood! One of your great ancestors felt the need to "edit" the cave painting of his caveman friend because he thought it to have way too much of a POV in favor of hunters, and ever since then his descendants—your ancestors—have been a precarious, scrutinizing, patronizing little bunch of (explicit word inserted here). So bring it on if you think you can polish this article and make it better than it already is, cuz I'll bring you down pal...bring you down to Chinatown. Or who knows, you might actually learn something and say "hey...that was pretty cool, I'm glad I took the time to read this and fully appreciate the modern time in which I live, because living back then would totally suck...even more than the new casts of SNL and MadTV combined!" Ain't it the truth. Pericles of Athens^Talk 07:07, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment blinking good stuff, but (and I'm sure you saw this one coming) could you consider reducing the length of the article, making more use of daughter articles? It's over 100K and WP:SIZE suggests articles this long may be "unreadable" (its word, not mine!), "> 100 KB Almost certainly should be divided up". I suggest you aim for a max length of c.80K. Yes, there's a lot to say, but the same could be said of many FA quality articles that cover huge topics, but fit within the guidelines. Also, the lead contravenes the guidelines at WP:LEAD - it should be three or four paragraphs; currently, it's five monster parags. --Dweller (talk) 14:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
• Support: complete but too long... can you create new articles with informations (now in the page) about: History, Governance, Economy ecc... of the dinasty? --Brískelly 17:14, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Contribs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:00, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Response: Oh boy, you guys are killing me! I had to do this for Song Dynasty and its sub articles, and that took me about 2 months of solid work! Sheesh, this one is going to have to be longer than I thought. Alright kiddos, hold on to your bootstraps, this is going to be a LONG ride.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 18:31, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Response: On second thought, let me see what I can do to reduce the article's length now to a more acceptable level. Then I'll decide if it still needs to break off into sub-articles.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 18:35, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good. Drop me a line at my talk page when you're done. --Dweller (talk) 19:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

• Response: Update --> I have just reduced the article's size from 102 KB to 96 KB! I hope that 96 KB is acceptable for this article's size and scope.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:01, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Overall size is less important than readable prose; current readable prose is 66KB. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Ok; this article is 66 KB of readable prose, while WP:SIZE says this about 60 KB of readable prose --> "Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time)" <-- The Ming Dynasty was an almost 300 year period of Chinese history; I think it's justifiable to keep all the information that is already here. I think cutting any more of it will hurt the clarity of the article (I've already removed most of the questionable fluff). Plus, everything is carefully divided into tons of easily-digestible sub-sections, so that each important topic is addressed in a compact fashion.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 05:07, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
• Comment. I don't see a pressing need to split the article. Even if "Government" or "Society" were split out, the summary would be fairly long for completeness. I think galleries are frowned upon, though. Gimmetrow 09:12, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Agreed. Definitely drop the gallery. I also suspect that many of the images have been included to be ornamentation, rather than to illustrate the text. There is a difference. --Dweller (talk) 12:16, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

You got it; I deleted the gallery at the end, replaced two images that were merely decorative and did not reflect the content of the nearby text, and salvaged one image from the gallery in context of the Science and Technology section with an image citation about the encyclopedist Song Yingxing's writing on the ceramics industry.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:31, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment Well done on the reduction, but I think you can do more. The History section would be sufficient for an FA quality article - History of the Ming Dynasty. You could then summarise the key issues here.
• Comment In the infobox, under population:

- 1393 est. 72,700,000

- 1400 est. 65,000,000¹

the text details 100,000 people being purged in about that period (if I read it right) but a drop of nearly 7 million implies either there's a dispute about the figures or there was some catastrophe. Either way, it can't be left without explanation. I also notice that while the 1400 and 1600 figures are cited, the 1393 and 1644 are not.

• Response: Brook talks about population figures and how government census figures in the Ming cannot be trusted due to widespread and massive avoidance of tax registration; as well as local administrators not reporting faithful population figures to the central government so they could get away with shaving money off the top of the revenues for themselves. If you want I can get the Brook citations for these; do you want them?--Pericles of Athens^Talk 19:45, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Tricky. Infoboxes are not really the place to have contentious issues discussed. I'd plump for listing all, with a footnote referring the reader to a place (in this article or elsewhere) where the figures are all referenced and the controversy explained. --Dweller (talk) 12:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
• Another infobox issue: "Ming Dynasty still kept the rule on Southern China until 1662 which is seen as the Southern Ming." Horrible English. --Dweller (talk) 17:19, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Haha! That is horrible English; I just changed that sentence. As to population figures, I guess it's about time that I busted out the good ole Brook volume again. I think I should be as bold as to give population analysis its own section at the end, since clearing that issue up might entail a great deal of explanation.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 21:24, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support. Absolutely brilliant. Gzli888 (talk) 10:23, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• Query "these strict laws encouraged many Chinese merchants to simply engage in widespread illegal trade and smuggling" - would removing those words improve the sentence?--Kiyarrllston 22:52, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

It certainly would; I got rid of the two words you struck out here, and the sentence is now crisper and devoid of excessive wording. Good suggestion, Dwarf Kirlston. That's a very unusual name you have there; how did you come up with it and what prompted you to choose that user name?--Pericles of Athens^Talk 23:52, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support. Incredible article. --Hemlock Martinis (talk) 07:24, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Discussion of size of History section

I have been musing on this for a few days. Above, I expressed concerns about the overall length of this article and suggested that a major pruning of the History section would help. After further thought, I have deeper concerns. Basically, the History dominates the article far too disproportionately - taking up roughly 50% of the space of this article. Yes, it's important. But it can't be as important as all other aspects of the Dynasty put together (if you get my drift). Furthermore, the impact is to subsume the most important developments and changes with a morass of interesting, but nonetheless less crucial detail.

I therefore urge the article's editors to dump out the contents verbatim to a new History of the Ming Dynasty (or similarly named) article, add a {{main}} template here and then hack down the essentials.

I'm not prepared to oppose on this basis, but it does concern me greatly. Very interested to know what other reviewers think. --Dweller (talk) 12:30, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I see what you mean, Dweller, and I'd like to see what others have to say.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 22:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Pericles and I are discussing / working on this on his talk page and elsewhere. --Dweller (talk) 16:00, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, with the new population analysis section I've created at the end, I think the content other than the history section content now balances out the proportions of the article so that half is now located outside the history section.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 03:33, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support - Good read. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 23:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
• Support, this deserves to be an FA as it is. I found it to be a light and entertaining read. There's no need to split it off or to make any other cosmetic changes. Basically, everything about this topic is "history" with the government, social and scientific sections there allowing a more indepth treatment than otherwise possible. Humortueio (talk) 00:14, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks guys. I have an update for the article: I just added a new section, "Population: an analysis", which covers some of the concerns expressed above ^ about population figures.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 22:39, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment Why "Ming Dynasty" and not "Ming dynasty"? There's a policy somewhere about unnecessary capitalizations. indopug (talk) 20:20, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Two reasons; for one, we're not just talking about some familial dynasty here, we're talking about the name of an entire country and place. Would you spell the USA as the United states of america? Would you spell Great Britain as Great britain? No. Second reason: even if I were to change that here, that would mean changing it for every single Chinese dynasty article on wikipedia (let's be consistent here). Different authors of Chinese history use either lower case or upper case, so you could argue either way from scholarly sources on this issue.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:24, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore, Wikipedia:History standards for China-related articles has all dynasty articles capitalized, and says to do so in the instructions.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:36, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment The lead section is too long, & could still do with some summarizing. Consider cutting phrases such as while some assert the population could actually have been as large as, which belong in the body of the article rather than the lead. Again, this sentence sounds a bit awkward & should be trimmed: The Ming Dynasty, ... ruled over the Empire of the Great Ming ... as China was then known.

Para 2 is fine, but para 3 is rather long-winded. For example, what exactly is meant by Rural cultural trends became characteristically more commercialized and urbanized? This & the following 2 sentences could be more pithily expressed.

The word silver occurs no fewer than four times in the last paragraph: it must be possible to eliminate some of this!

I don't mean to sound too negative about what is in other respects a well-researched & meticulously written article. My comments simply reflect my conviction that the lead section, which is supposed to crystallize the essence of any article, should be crisp & focussed. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:30, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

• ResponseOk, I followed some of your suggestions, including that of the first paragraph and third paragraph, but I fail to see how saying the word "silver" in four different occasions is a bad thing when the word is needed to complete a simple statement. This is done for sake of clarity and to show the reader what is to be found in the article; I have to disagree that this introduction is excessively long. I've seen much, much worse.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 11:54, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Support This is a huge improvement. I've made a few further revisions of the lead section, which you can revert or keep as you see fit. Good luck! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 16:26, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

No, the edits are just fine, you certainly have a way with words and ability to minimize; something I seriously need to work on (in general, not just with this article).--Pericles of Athens^Talk 03:53, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

One more thing ... Some of the section headings strike me as a bit verbose for an encyclopedia: they'd be fine in a newspaper or magazine, but seem slightly out of place here. I'm thinking of headings such as Hongwu's vision, commercialization, and reversing his policies and Dependence on merchants, an open market, and silver: they're too much like summaries. But I suppose these things are a matter of taste—just thought I'd mention it. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:19, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

I thought someone might bring that up; trouble is, are there better titles you can suggest that would still capture the essence of what's being described in these sections? Believe it or not, those section titles used to be even longer! Lol. I try.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 03:53, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

I just shortened one of the titles you mentioned, so that it now reads Dependence on Merchants, an open market, and silver. There's one down, more to go?--Pericles of Athens^Talk 03:57, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind words. BTW I see that the second sentence has now been reverted to ... while some assert it was as large as 200 million. This is just the sort of detail that shouldn't be in a lead section. All the details are in the Population section: in the lead it's quite sufficient to say a population of 160 to 200 million people.

Incidentally, the section title Population: an analysis sounds a little bit pretentious, & suggests possible OR. Why not simply Population?

As for the the other titles, where does one start? If I were writing the article I'd choose shorter ones—but then we all have our preferences & prejudices. To my mind some of the titles just strike the wrong note for an encyclopedia article. The titles don't really need to "capture the essence of what's being described": they're just headings, for heaven's sake! Reign of the Yongle Emperor is fine (though since reigning is what emperors do rather a lot of, Yongle Emperor on its own would be enough). But Hongwu's vision, commercialization, and reversing his policies strikes me as too long & even a tad clumsy: why not simply Hongwu Emperor? One final example: Breaking the mold: Wang Yangming's Confucianism. Breaking the mold ought to go: it sounds journalistic—trying just a little too hard to catch the reader's attention.

These are just a few pointers: hope they help! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:08, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

As you've suggested, I've shortened a few more titles to appropriate length. As to the statement about population in the introduction, that was replaced by user Balthazarduju, so take it up with him if you think it is even worth it.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:06, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Nope: I've just gone ahead & changed it back ... I took the opportunity to make a few other minor changes in the lead. All in all the article is looking pretty impressive: well done! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 16:12, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comments

Contrasting the current Ming Dynasty article with the Three Kingdoms article makes the existence of the "In Popular" culture section stand out. Do you think the article could possibly treat this topic?

What do you think of a historiography section? - How the study of the Ming Dynasty has progressed certainly seems a worthwhile topic. "Historiography of China"?

Do I note a disagreement between the Beijing article and the Ming Dynasty article? from the Beijing article "Beijing or Peking (北京) literally means "northern capital" [...] element meaning "capital" (jing or king, 京) —" and from the Ming Dynasty article: "there were also two large areas that belonged to no province, but were metropolitan areas (jing) attached to Nanjing and Beijing" -There must be an error, - does jing mean metropolitan area or capital? either one article is wrong or the other, right?

I look forward to continuing commenting on this FAC.

Do you know why there isn't there an article on the "Grand Secretariat"?

I note a truly large amount of parenthesis. I find them distasteful, and that flow can generally be improved by either removing useless information (25% of useless information is extremely useless) or by integrating it, since 75% of useless information is marginally useful. Parenthesis are obviously good for translations - but, for example "100,000 shengyuan ('government students', the lowest tier of graduates)" can be changed to "100,000 shengyuan ('government students'), the lowest tier of graduates" - don't you think?

--Kiyarrllston 16:06, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Response

1) The Three Kingdoms article has a "In popular culture" section because the era has been heavily popularized by the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as well as several video game series and now John Woo's upcoming film about the Battle of Red Cliffs. There is simply nothing in comparison to popular culture focused on the Ming Dynasty, spare a multitude of costume dramas by CCTV in China. If you bring up material that you think is useful to the article and a new "In popular culture" section, then I would be more than glad to add this new section. However, if I do, it's not going to be long, considering the current length of this article.

2) Yes, a look at the progress of historiography would be a worthy subject to add, especially with the History of Ming (or Ming Shi). I tried to incorporate this a bit with the population section at the end of the article.

3) No, the Beijing article is not false and neither is the information I gathered from Hucker's journal in this article; jing does mean capital and in the sense of the wider metropolitan area, it simply means the larger area around the capital cities that do not belong to an official province.

4) I'm not sure why there isn't an article on the Grand Secretariat; if I had more sources to treat the subject well, I would begin the article myself. In the meantime, browse through Chancellor of China; that article has some useful information.

5) Lol, I'll see what I can do about the excessive parenthesis.

Yours truly,--Pericles of Athens^Talk 16:23, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comments: A very fine piece of work you got there. But I think the section "Institutional trends" is quite confusing, especially the paragraph

The Hongwu Emperor abolished the Secretariat, the Censorate, and the Chief Military Commission and personally took charge of the Six Ministries and the Five Military Commissions. Thus a whole level of administration was cut out and only partially rebuilt by subsequent rulers. The Grand Secretariat was reinstalled, but without employing grand counselors, or chancellors. The ministries, headed by a minister and run by directors remained under direct control of the emperor until the end of the Ming.

It's confusing because the Secretariat (an institute?) was abolished but then the Grand Secretariat (a post?) was reinstalled later. And what's their relationship? Also shouldn't there be at least a sentence that briefly describes the Six Ministries, rather then leave it till the next subsection?

As I understand it, Hongwu Emperor abolished the Chancellor (cheng xiang, the head of all the Six Ministries) and then set up a consulting institute in 1382, which had half a dozen secretaries/consultants (dai xue shi) working in it. The head of those secretaries (Grand Secretariat?) acted as the Chancellor, but didn't have his power. Zhang Juzheng was one of them. The names of the various posts have to be consistent throughout the article. Josuechan (talk) 07:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The Grand Secretariat is an institution; the Grand Secretary is the post. If you have scholarly sources for your claims, I encourage you to edit the article. The information that I used came from Hucker. The Six Ministries are carefully described and detailed in the following sub-section; I see no reason to describe it further.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 10:20, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reference. I guess my problem was that I didn't know the English names of those institutions and it's much better now. I expanded that section a bit (regarding the Secretariat) and I'll see what I can do about the Grand Secretariat. I read the relevant section of Hucker. But pg. 28 (ref 114) only said that Hongwu abolished the Secretariat, but didn't mention about the Censorate and the Chief Military Commission, no? Also, I think it's a good idea to copy the info about the six ministries to make a new article. Thanks. Josuechan (talk) 15:34, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Awesome work on the new article, Three Departments and Six Ministries! I might contribute to that article soon as well, but for now my focus is elsewhere and on this article. If you want to incorporate any info stated about the Six Ministries here in the Ming Dynasty article using Hucker (or simply copy the info and place it in your new article) that's fine too.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 12:44, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I created an entry Grand Secretariat out of infomation I gathered from Hucker and elsewhere. If you don't mind, I'm going to add some more context to the relevant section in the Ming article. And yes, the 3 departments article needs a whole lot more of work. Come and help out when you have time. Josuechan (talk) 09:34, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Great! I would love to contribute; let me find some worthy journal article sources at JSTOR, since the books that I presently own do not thoroughly describe the Ming political structure.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 22:10, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Support undiminishedComment The Notes section doesn't look quite right yet. Some of the sources (Ebrey & Robinson) are laboriously written out in full in each footnote, while most are simply—and in my view correctly—referred to by surname (eg Spence, 27). Looking at the References, it seems that this is because there is more than one book by Robinson & Ebrey. This problem is overcome by writing Robinson (1999) or Robinson (2000), and Ebrey (1999) or Ebrey et al (2006) as the case may be.

BTW I don't think the entry Ebrey, Walthall, Palais in the Refs is correctly formatted: there should be some first names or initials for the 3 authors. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:41, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

PS Why is Timur given in the See Also section, yet no mention made of him in the article? The Ming are mentioned in Timur, but not vice versa. The same applies to Ye Chunji. There may be good reasons for including these links; but the reasons should be made clear within this article—if only in the form of a brief explanation. Otherwise, why on earth would anyone click on the mysterious Ye Chunji? --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:51, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

PPS See Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout#See_also --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:20, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree with your point about the Ebrey and Robinson references, and I will change those shortly. However, I am a bit puzzled as to why you would ask the question of why links that don't appear in the prose of the article are featured in the "See also" section. According to WP:LAYOUT, links in the "See also" section "should not link to pages that do not exist, and a good rule of thumb is that it should not repeat links already present in the article." The reason that these links are found at the bottom is because they are high quality links to the Ming Dynasty which are not mentioned in the article, and are there as a guide to help people understand more about the Ming Dynasty without me having to expand this already gigantic article further. Plus, the so-called "mysterious" Ye Chunji has more relevant information on the Ming Dynasty in his tiny article than does the entire and rather large Timur article that readers would have to navigate through simply to find 2 or 3 sentences about China.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

As you suggested, I just fixed all of the Ebrey and Robinson citations; that was some work! Glad that's over. Thanks for bringing that up; I think the article is 1 KB shorter because of that trimming of citation wording.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

You can award yourself some sort of barnstar (or perhaps Augean stables-star) for that heroic bit of editing. I hope, at least, that you'll agree the whole thing looks a lot tidier now.

As for the See also section, look a bit more carefully at the last sentence of WP:LAYOUT#See_also. The point is that Timur & Ye Chunji may well be mysterious to Joe Public (not everyone will know, for instance, that Timur is Tamerlane). Go on, give them a little help! Add a few words telling them why they might find it useful to See also these no doubt worthy & fascinating articles ... --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 17:03, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

PS While you're at it, you could indicate next to the See also links that Ye Chunji is a useful source of relevant information—& maybe even consider getting rid of Timur if there's so little material there.

BTW Are you using a good editor, such as wikEd? I ask because a powerful editor with good search&destroyreplace, perhaps using regex, might have made the citation edits a lot easier! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 17:40, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Good advice; I added a little note in the See also section about Ye Chunji and I deleted Timur.--Pericles of Athens^Talk 19:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Excellent. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:42, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.